


In Another Life

by mardia



Category: Life
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-24
Updated: 2009-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-05 03:40:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/37418
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mardia/pseuds/mardia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Four lives that Rachel Seybolt never got to have. (Written as a Yuletide Treat.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Another Life

**Author's Note:**

  * For [centuries](https://archiveofourown.org/users/centuries/gifts).



**one. **

 

Rachel’s later told that it’s a week before Uncle Charlie and Aunt Jen come to take her home.  She has to be told, because she doesn’t know it herself—everything’s been this foggy blur for so long, that she doesn’t know how long she’s been in this hospital.

 

She remembers Aunt Jen and Uncle Charlie though, which is why she’s so relieved when it’s them that come to take her back to their house, instead of some strangers. And even if Aunt Jen’s crying and Uncle Charlie’s really quiet, she still knows them, and for a second, Rachel can really think that everything’s going to be okay.

 

Until she remembers what happened, and then Rachel knows that it’s not okay, it’ll never be okay again.

 

 

*

 

Uncle Charlie and Aunt Jen don’t want her to go to court. The police have caught the man who—they’ve caught the bad guy, but now there’s going to a trial so he can go to jail, and the police and the lawyers want Rachel to testify, but Rachel doesn’t want to, and Aunt Jen and Uncle Charlie don’t want her to either.

 

When the men in the uniforms and the suits come to talk to her aunt and uncle, Uncle Charlie kisses her on the forehead and tells her to go upstairs to her new room, that it’ll be all right. Rachel goes up to her new room, and she closes her eyes and listens (because last time there was yelling downstairs she tried to cover her ears, and it didn’t help at all, horrible things were happening while she was upstairs, covering her ears) and so she listens while Uncle Charlie tells the men downstairs that they can go to hell, that they’re not going to traumatize her any more than she has been.

 

Rachel listens, and she’s not afraid, because Uncle Charlie told her that everything would be all right.

 

And it is, because Uncle Charlie gets his way, and so do the police, because Rachel doesn’t go to court, but the bad man (Kyle Hollis, is what they call him on the news) goes to prison anyway, and Aunt Jen tells Rachel that he’s never coming out, and she sounds really happy—or not happy, but something that’s like being glad, but in a meaner way, about it.

 

Once the trial’s over, Aunt Jen and Uncle Charlie start talking about moving to another city, maybe another state, ask her what she thinks of that. Rachel shrugs and says she doesn’t mind.

 

*

 

Rachel Crews (she’s had the last name now for nearly five years, and it fits her well) is not quite fourteen years old when Uncle Charlie (she calls him Dad now, but it’s still Uncle Charlie in the back of her mind) comes home from work one day and tells her quietly that Kyle Hollis was murdered in prison.

 

Rachel’s drawing in front of the TV for her art class and when he tells her this, she lowers her pencil. “Oh,” she says, instead of _Good_, which is what she’s really thinking, underneath the shock and the old pain. She’s thinking _good_, but she won’t say it out loud, not to him.

 

“Do you want to talk about it?” Uncle Charlie asks, his voice warm with concern.

 

“No,” Rachel decides after a moment, and that’s the last time that they ever talk about Kyle Hollis again.

 

**two.**

 

The tombstone reads:

 

_Rachel Elizabeth Seybolt_

_1987-1994._

_TAKEN FROM US TOO SOON._

Her grandmother visits the graves of Rachel and her family every Sunday, without fail, until she herself dies of a heart attack in 2004.

 

Charlie Crews is released from prison in 2007, but he never goes to visit Rachel’s grave.

 

**three. **

 

The only visitor Dani regularly gets in rehab is her little sister. Her dad’s sure as hell not going to show up, and Dani’s fairly sure he’s forbidden her mother from coming here too.  Not that Dani particularly _wants_ her mother to see her here, so that actually works out for the best.

 

But Anna comes every week, without fail, and that means something, especially since Dani knows that their father’s forbidden it, and that (unlike Dani) Anna actually cares what their dad says.

 

Today’s different from Anna’s other visits though. Today she looks upset, her blue eyes are red-rimmed, and her mouth’s a little shaky when she tries to smile at Dani.

 

Dani’s not fooled for a minute. “Anna, what’s going on?” she asks bluntly.

 

Anna tries to keep the smile up for a few more seconds, but it crumples and she says, in an ashamed whisper, “I—I had another nightmare last night. About—my other family.”

 

Dani’s voice is completely even, but she tries to be as gentle as she can be. “A bad one?”

 

“They’re all bad,” Anna tells her. “But this one—it felt real. More real than usual, and I—I saw his face. The man who—who killed them.”

 

Dani thinks about reaching out and brushing her shoulder, but they’ve never been those sort of siblings and it seems weird to pretend now. “You saw Crews.”

 

“_No_,” Anna says, emphatic, and Dani’s eyes widen in surprise. “That’s the problem—Dani. It wasn’t Crews that I saw. It’s never been Crews, not once, not in any of the dreams—it’s never him. It’s always the same guy, and it’s never Charlie Crews.”

 

Dani’s stomach is already sinking, but she hears Anna out anyway, because it’s all she can do, because Anna deserves that much, at least.

 

*

 

Dani was already in high school when her father brought Anna home. Of course, Anna had only been Anna for a few months by that point, before that, she’d been Rachel Seybolt, the sole survivor of a murdered family.

 

Now, of course, she’s Anna Reese, Dani’s kid sister, who’s studying for the SATs, who’s the captain of her soccer team, who’s the poster child for the All-American girl.

 

Except for the nightmares she has almost every night, like clockwork, of the man that murdered her family. A man that apparently isn’t the same guy that’s currently serving life in prison for that same crime, and seriously, Dani has no idea what to do with this.

 

This is one topic they don’t cover in rehab.

 

*

 

Anna refuses to let it go. Now every time she visits Dani, their conversations always circle back to the same thing: Charlie Crews.

 

“I don’t think he did it,” Anna shakily confesses one afternoon, while they’re sitting in Dani’s new, post-rehab, apartment. “Dani, I’m remembering more of my old life, before I came to live with you guys, and I don’t—“

 

“Anna,” Dani says, trying to sound as reasonable as possible. “You were a little kid. It was so long ago, you can’t really think—“

 

“He was my _Uncle Charlie_,” Anna insists. “He, he bought me ice cream at the beach and he babysat me when I had the chicken pox and he just…I just don’t think that he did it.”

 

Dani sighs. “Have you talked to Dad about this?”

 

Anna just looks at Dani, and Dani sighs again. “Yeah, of course you didn’t.” And Dani really can’t blame Anna on that score either. Dani’s not sure what her dad would say in response to this, but she can _imagine_ it, and it’s not pretty.

 

She looks at her little sister again. “Okay,” she says, with more patience than she feels. “So, what do you want to do now?”

 

Anna takes a breath, looking nervous but determined. “I want—I’ve arranged to go visit him. At Pelican Bay.” There’s no question as to whom Anna’s referring, and as Dani’s eyes grow wide, Anna continues quickly, before Dani can interrupt, “And I want—I want you to come with me.”

 

 

*

 

This is, without question, the stupidest thing that Dani has done since she got out of rehab. But as she’s walking across the yard of Pelican Bay, her sister’s ice-cold hand in hers, Dani keeps her shoulders straight, and her gaze fixed straight ahead at the man who’s waiting for them at a table, his red hair gleaming in the sun.

 

“You know what you’re going to say?” Dani asks as they get closer to the table where Crews is sitting next to his attorney, a woman with dark hair and a power suit.

 

“Yeah,” Anna replies, her voice soft. “I’m going to ask him if he did it.” _And then you’ll tell me if he’s lying when he says no_, Anna doesn’t say, not out loud, but both of them can hear it anyway.

 

 

*

 

He’s not lying. Dani has no idea what to do next, but she believes Crews when he says he didn’t do it, and what’s worse, Anna believes him too.

 

Dani doesn’t know what to expect, but she knows this isn’t going to be Anna’s last visit out to Pelican Bay, and that means it won’t be Dani’s last visit either.

 

Anna stays quiet on the ride back home, until she says finally, her voice tentative, “I liked him. I wasn’t expecting to, but I did.”

 

“Yeah,” Dani agrees. “So did I.” And the hell of it is that she _did_, she’d liked Crews’s quiet sincerity, the way he’d respectfully called Anna by her name, instead of calling her Rachel, the name that she hasn’t answered to for almost a decade now. She’d liked how he’d stayed quiet and let Anna talk, rather than plead his case too vigorously.

 

She’d liked him, and Dani’s almost furious about that fact, because now that she does like Crews, now that she believes that he’s innocent—they’re all in for a world of trouble, and Dani, for one, has no idea what to do about it, other than protect Anna, like she’s always tried to do.

 

**four. **

 

Rachel doesn’t know what she’s expecting when she sees Charlie Crews for the first time in twelve years, but it’s not what she gets when she does see him—this man in an expensive suit with his odd mannerisms, and the careful way he looks at her when he thinks she’s not paying attention.

 

They don’t talk about her birth family, or the long years he spent in prison. Instead, he asks her about herself, and she can tell that he really wants to know. So Rachel tells him about her foster family that took her in, about her courses at UCLA, about the art that she paints now. She talks about her friends and her part-time job at the bookstore, about her roommate’s insane cat that sheds everywhere and is a colossal pain in the butt.

 

Rachel sits across at the lunch table from a man who used to be her uncle, who is still technically her godparent, and who is bound to her in ways she might never understand, and she tells him all the details of the ordinary, normal life she’s somehow managed to piece together in the last twelve years, through some extraordinary luck, wonderful foster parents, and a massive, massive amount of therapy.

 

They don’t talk so much about him, about what brought him to go work for the LAPD, at least not until the end of their lunch. But then Rachel brings it up, because she can’t _not_. “Are you going to find him?” she asks quietly, twisting up the napkin in her lap.

 

“Find who, Rachel?” Charlie (he’d asked her to call him that) asks gently.

 

She looks him right in the eyes and says it straight out. “The man who murdered my family and ruined your life. Are you going to find him?”

 

Before she’d come here to this restaurant, Rachel had wondered if Charlie was going to give her an honest answer to this question. Five minutes into this lunch, and Rachel had known he’d tell her the truth, but it’s still gratifying, somehow, to hear him say, “Yes. I am.”

 

She nods and asks, carefully, “And what are you going to do when you find him?”

 

He pauses for a long moment before he answers. “I’m going to arrest him.”

 

Rachel’s quiet too for a while, and finds that she’s more satisfied with this answer than she’d thought she’d be. “Okay.”

 

Her shift at the bookstore starts soon after their lunch ends, and he offers her a ride in what’s probably the most expensive car she’s ever been in. Halfway to her workplace, Rachel says, as casually as she can, “You know—I’m going to be graduating in May. You might—I’d like it, if you came to the ceremony.”

 

She doesn’t look at him while she’s waiting for a response, but she can feel him looking at her. “I’d like that,” Charlie says at last, sounding pleased and touched. “I really would.”

 

“Okay,” Rachel says, staring out through the windshield. “Good then.”

 

And it is.


End file.
